South Africa in Opera Mini top 10 users

South Africa rated among the top 10 countries using the Opera Mini browser to surf contents on mobile phones. In its latest State of the Mobile Web report on Tuesday, Opera said 35.6 million people used the application in September, an 11.5% increase from August 2009 and more than 150% compared to September 2008.
The Norway software developer stated that Nigeria was axed from the top 10 countries’ list while Vietnam made a debut. It said more than 2 petabytes of data is now processed by its servers on a monthly basis amounting to 2,000 terabytes .

Nokia and Samsung were the most used mobile phone brands in browsing, according to the report.

Opera highlighted that users in the top 10 countries – Russia, Indonesia, India, China, Ukraine, South Africa, United States, United Kingdom, Poland and Vietnam – saved up to $672 million USD per month, or over $8.1 billion USD per year due to the compression rate of 90% and the subsequent savings in mobile data charges from users’ operators.

Data traffic through Opera’s mobile browser — which compresses up to 90% of the data to save network bandwidth – rose 8.7% in September compared to August, the company said. About four million new Opera Mini users were gained in that same period of time, the report added.

The report revealed that Opera Mini users viewed nearly 15 billion pages in September 2009. Since August, page-views have gone up 7.2%. Since September 2008, page-views have increased 230%. Click for full report